Bhagat Singh: The Life, Beliefs, and Legacy of a Young Revolutionary

On 8 April 1929, two young men sat in the visitors’ gallery of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. During the debate on a public safety bill that would give the government sweeping powers of arrest, they threw two low-intensity bombs onto an empty stretch of the floor below, placed so that nobody would be hurt. Then, instead of running, they shouted “Inquilab Zindabad”, scattered leaflets and waited to be arrested. One was Batukeshwar Dutt, and the other, twenty-one years old, was Bhagat Singh.

Bhagat Singh Indian revolutionary freedom fighter

They wanted a trial, and above all a courtroom from which they could explain their ideas to the country. Within two years Bhagat Singh had used that courtroom, his prison writings and his own execution to become one of the best-known figures of the freedom struggle.

Bhagat Singh’s family and childhood

Bhagat Singh was born on 28 September 1907 in the village of Banga in Lyallpur district, Punjab, now in Pakistan. His father Kishan Singh and his uncle Ajit Singh were both active in anti-colonial politics, and the family had links to the revolutionaries of the Ghadar movement, which tried to overthrow British rule by armed uprising. Ajit Singh spent years in exile, and jail and police raids were familiar parts of family life.

He was eleven when the Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place in Amritsar on 13 April 1919. Troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd, killing hundreds. According to family accounts, Bhagat Singh went to the site soon afterwards and brought home a little of the blood-soaked earth, which he kept for years.

How he turned to revolution

As a teenager he studied at the National College in Lahore, set up by nationalists for students who had left government schools during the Non-Cooperation Movement. Gandhi’s withdrawal of that movement in 1922, after the violence at Chauri Chaura, disappointed many young men like him and pushed them towards revolutionary groups.

He read widely and seriously: Marx and Lenin, Mazzini and the Italian unification, the Irish nationalists, the Russian revolutionaries and anarchists. His letters and notes show someone trying to work out what kind of country India should become after the British left, as well as how to drive them out.

In 1926 he helped found the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, a youth organisation that demanded complete independence and rejected communal politics. He was also part of the Hindustan Republican Association, and in September 1928, at a meeting at Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, the group renamed itself the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), largely at his urging. The new word mattered to him, because he believed political freedom meant little without economic freedom.

Lala Lajpat Rai and the killing of Saunders

In October 1928, Lala Lajpat Rai led a peaceful protest in Lahore against the Simon Commission, a British commission on constitutional reform that had no Indian members. Police under Superintendent James Scott charged the crowd with lathis, and Lajpat Rai was badly beaten. He died on 17 November 1928.

The HSRA decided to kill Scott in revenge. On 17 December 1928 Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and their comrades waited outside the police office in Lahore, but in a case of mistaken identity they shot John Saunders, an Assistant Superintendent, instead.

Bhagat Singh then escaped from Lahore by cutting his hair and shaving his beard, a serious step for a Sikh, and travelling in disguise. He stayed underground in different parts of India for about four months.

Why Bhagat Singh bombed the Central Assembly

By early 1929, Bhagat Singh had come to believe that secret killings would not win over the public. What the movement needed was an open trial, where the revolutionaries could state their case and the newspapers would carry it across India.

The Assembly bombing of 8 April 1929 was planned with that in mind. The leaflets he and Dutt threw began with the line “It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear”, borrowed from the French anarchist Auguste Vaillant. They made no attempt to escape and were arrested on the spot.

The Lahore Conspiracy Case

Bhagat Singh and Dutt were sentenced to transportation for life for the Assembly bombing. Police then linked Bhagat Singh to the Saunders killing, and he was tried again, with Rajguru, Sukhdev and others, in what became known as the Lahore Conspiracy Case. This time the charge was murder, and the likely sentence was death.

He used the proceedings exactly as he had planned. His statements were reported across India, and his hunger strike for better treatment of political prisoners made headlines for weeks. In September 1929 his comrade Jatin Das died in Lahore jail after a 63-day hunger strike, and huge crowds turned out for his funeral procession.

In prison he also wrote, most famously the essay Why I Am an Atheist. Young people who had barely heard his name two years earlier now followed the case daily. He was still only twenty-two.

The hanging of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev

On 23 March 1931, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged in Lahore Central Jail. Bhagat Singh was twenty-three. The execution was carried out at about 7:30 in the evening, roughly eleven hours ahead of the scheduled time on the morning of 24 March, apparently to avoid the crowds gathering outside the jail.

The bodies were secretly cremated at Hussainiwala, on the bank of the Sutlej near Ferozepur. When the news spread, protests broke out in cities across India, schools and shops closed, and newspapers printed the reports with black borders. A National Martyrs Memorial now stands at Hussainiwala.

What Bhagat Singh believed

Bhagat Singh called himself a socialist and, from his prison years, an atheist. For him, independence from Britain was only the first step. A free India, he argued, would also have to end economic exploitation, communal division and untouchability, or else one set of exploiters would simply replace another.

He was not the leader of the freedom movement; that role belonged to Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress. What he showed was that a young man of modest means, with no army and no money, could refuse British terms and make the government take him seriously.

His face is still everywhere: in a turban in many painted portraits, and in the felt hat of the best-known photograph, on posters in hostels, party offices and barber shops. “Inquilab Zindabad”, a slogan he did not coin (it is credited to the poet Hasrat Mohani) but made famous, is still shouted at rallies of every political colour.

If you want to read him in his own words, start with Why I Am an Atheist. It is short, it was written when he was twenty-three and facing the gallows, and it answers in his own voice the charge that he was simply vain or reckless.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is 23 March observed as Shaheed Diwas?

It marks the day in 1931 when Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged in Lahore. Tributes are held across India, especially in Punjab and at Hussainiwala.

Where was Bhagat Singh cremated?

At Hussainiwala, on the Sutlej near Ferozepur in Punjab. The bodies were taken there secretly from Lahore jail on the night of the hanging.

Did Bhagat Singh’s Assembly bombs kill anyone?

No. The bombs were thrown onto an empty part of the chamber and were meant to make a noise, not to kill. A few members suffered minor injuries at most.

Who was Batukeshwar Dutt?

He was Bhagat Singh’s HSRA comrade who threw the second bomb in the Assembly. He was sentenced to transportation for life, survived imprisonment and died in 1965.

Sources and Further Reading

Jitendra Nath Sanyal, Sardar Bhagat Singh, a biography by his contemporary
Kuldip Nayar, The Martyr: Bhagat Singh, Experiments in Revolution, Har Anand Publications
Bhagat Singh, Why I Am an Atheist, in The Jail Notebook and Other Writings, LeftWord Books
Government of India, National Archives, records of the Lahore Conspiracy Case